Taline Assi

Mosaic Marble

Company Snapshot

When it comes to high-end décor, only one company graces the floors of both Middle Eastern and Hollywood royalty. Since its founding in 2003, Mosaic Marble has built a solid reputation as the most professional mosaics company in the Middle East, consistently offering high standards of quality and timely order fulfillments at competitive prices. Mosaic Marble has served 15,000 clients in over a dozen countries, including high-profile individuals such as Princess Alia of Jordan and Oprah Winfrey, as well as high-visibility venues such as the Queen Elisabeth Theater in London and the Mulino casino in Croatia. Until recently, founder Taline Assi’s main focus has been building an unparalleled network of suppliers and professionalizing her workforce of artisans across Lebanon and Syria.

Born and raised in Lebanon, Taline fell in love with entrepreneurship during her college years. In 1998, while pursuing her bachelor’s in Hospitality Management and Marketing at the Lebanese American University, Taline helped her boyfriend at the time, Antoine Assi, start one of the first web development companies in Lebanon. Antoine had figured out the way to her heart: the couple got married later that year and Taline has been a committed entrepreneur ever since. The following year they launched www.aldoukan.com, an e-commerce site to deliver Lebanese products all over the world. Within months of being added to the site, hand-made mosaics were the top-selling item and Taline’s inbox was filled with requests for additional designs. Excited about the international demand for high-quality, affordable mosaics, Taline and Antoine sold the web development company and focused on running Aldoukan while launching a standalone mosaics business.

After studying the sites of the world’s leading mosaic companies, Taline worked with aldoukan.com’s in-house web designer to develop a new website for Mosaic Marble. The site launched in early 2003 with a selection of 30 popular designs and quickly gained traction. To better control manufacturing quality, cost and delivery times, Taline decided to bring the production process in-house: she spent over a year hiring and training skilled artisans in Syria and Lebanon and developing a system for quality control. With this flexible infrastructure in place, Taline shifted her focus outward: she experimented with different designs, adding her own to those requested by customers, and developed a pricing model based on the cost and ease of sourcing and the design complexity.

Mosaic Marble makes it convenient for customers–including museums, companies, individuals, and real estate developers–to purchase the mosaics of their dreams for interior and exterior decorations. Customers can select from one of the company’s 5,000 designs or submit their own. Thanks to its network of suppliers across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, Mosaic Marble has access to over 40 colors and six different types of stone and marble. It also has vast experience standardizing output quality from up to 400 artisans, earning it over 99% positive reviews on eBay.